Stop Staring at the Broken Gamer Couple

Day 4: Take a Screenshot it will last Longer 

Sunday is a busy family day and the aim of todays post is brevity. However, I wanted to discuss the tension between playing games versus a public relationship.

Gossip and Cursing 

Unlike courting avatars, it is strange to be a couple attempting to reconcile out and about in the real world.  Today I felt people watching me and I could not imagine why.  After a short while I realized social scrutiny was not triggered by a nip slip or toilet paper stuck to my shoes.  Instead people were waiting for something…something like a turrets screaming match to erupt at any moment.  Just to be clear: I did not start screaming curse words in front of my children at morning mass or the proceeding family breakfast.  I am trying to save all the insults and cursing for my blog and gaming.

Playing: Diablo 3

System: PS4 

Developer: Blizzard

Reflection: You are probably getting sick of me reflecting on Diablo but it is just the most fun game at this phase in our crisis.  Some days you just don’t want to pick up a controller and on those days watching someone play Diablo does not disappoint. Yesterday, I chose to watch Diablo instead of play.

Giving up the pirate life...Arrrrr 

Despite my use of profanity in my previous blog post I have thus far refrained from trash talk during gameplay.  Maybe I need to change my mental model from being a bitchy gamer to being a supportive nurturing gamer?  I will keep you posted on how well that goes but I anticipate getting a sailor to learn manners is not something that happens over night. Grrr...Arggg. 

Why Play Games Instead of Getting a Divorce?

Day 4: Choosing Games Not Pain 

This entry is not meant as a defense of my decision to stay married at this time.  It is a chance for me to understand my own thought process on the matter of choosing to game.   

When warning signs appear in a relationship it is difficult to have perspective and be objective.  This blog is about marital gaming but it is also about relationships.  Because what are relationships but a series of small interactions that help us connect, relate, and live our lives?  Games can be a powerful tool for friendship, intimacy, and play.  I am in painful and uncharted territory but when it comes to games I know the jargon and understand virtual worlds.

After meeting my partner 21 years ago, and almost 12 years of marriage I am learning a new language to understand my relationship.  During this phase of our marital crisis there are two ideas that resonate with me the most pain shopping and the dance of confrontation.   

Pain shopping is when a person examines and inquires on matters that do not bring healing.  For control freaks like me it feels like investigating helps to make informed decisions, but really pain shopping is just giving pain free rent in your brain.  As I mentioned in other blog posts, I do not enjoy shopping.

Dance of confrontation is starting one-sided arguments as an opportunity to vent and berate another person to regain some sense of control.  I am not saying that arguments, communication, and fights are not important.  But when you are in the midst of a tragedy its easy to just lash out instead of communicate.

Before I started this blog I spent a lot of time unknowingly subjecting myself to negative behaviors.  But now instead I choose to play games, not to avoid the problem but during the time in between dealing, I want to give myself something to do that is healthier.  I am blogging about gaming with my husband to remind myself that there is good not just pain left in our relationship. 

Laughter and Change

Game Show: Game of the Year

System: YouTube

Developer: Giant Bomb

Reflection:  The Game of the Year for Giant Bomb is hysterically funny and allowed us to enjoy both game time and cuddling.  Trolling through our old blog entries reminded me that GFW and Giant Bomb have been part of our gaming relationship for a long time.

Just because things still exist doesn’t mean that they remain static.  Giant Bomb has transformed over the last 6 years with new additions, tragedies, and evolving transmedia formats.  Giant Bomb has the same name and goal but it is not the same podcast it was when I listened before – Giant Bombcast and the guy I married can both still make me laugh. 

This blog has existed for more than 6 years and during that time my relationship and life have undergone major changes.  I don't know what other changes are on the horizon and I have no plan to make those decisions today.  Today I plan to keep gaming and I will continue to reflect on what I learn from that process whatever outcome that may be.

F-ck Tropes and Resolutions

Day 3: Hair Styles vs. Games

Since my marriage fell apart I have attempted to style my hair every single day.  I say “attempt” because my hair is still mostly big, glittering, and unruly but not for lack of hot irons and smeared goop.

  

Forfeiting my Girl Card

I know that I am not an unfortunate looking woman.  However, I have never been a girly-girl.  I do not enjoy shopping and do not feel like its necessary to purchase special occasion attire annually: I have a good LBD.  I do not own a cache of smelly lotions and perfumes.  I do not coordinate things like make-up, accessories, or jewelry for occasions or seasons.  I like the color black because you can wear it all year round.  If I have a special occasion I have to watch youtube tutorials for how to apply make-up and eyeliner or just pay someone to do it for me.  My mother-in-law helps with the girl-ifcation process and is in many ways my own personal shopper.  I am compelled to mention her during this post and give her credit, because if you are pleased by my appearance you should know she has bought the majority of the make-up, purses, and jewelry I own.     

I spend my spare time watching Hulu, reading books, doing yoga, and now a lot of time (gasp) playing games.  But now that I am having relationship troubles I feel like the fact that I am a semi-attractive geek is not enough.  Society and culture condition us to believe that if things go wrong it is probably because we aren’t pretty enough.  And I did not write this blog post fishing for validation, praise, or compliments (comments are completely un-necessary).  I wrote it because it is not fair that women are made to feel shitty about themselves when we do not have a Sephora card.  Even in the midst of how crappy I feel about myself, I have resisted going into the make-up mecca because of my firm belief that if it’s not on Amazon prime I can live without it.

Resolutions

The New Year has amplified the problem, including the many smart educated women in my life, everyone seems obsessed with looking better.  Not being happy but physically looking better.

Resolved 2015:

I will daily remind myself that my brain makes me hot.

I will continue to not go to Sephora.

I will spend more time gaming than primping (FYI grooming aka showers is not primp).

Tropes

I wrote about in my masters thesis a topic that has been popularized by Anita Sarkeesian that gaming tropes are not helping women.  Side note: I am totally geeking out about Joss and Anita hanging out and talking patriarchy.  As a geek I think that I am immune from social standards of beauty but that’s a big ole’ lie.  Booth babes, hypersexualized female game characters, and young attractive gaming journalists continue to make women geeks feel like shit.  I am writing this post because I don’t want to save my relationship by looking more like Christie Monteiro, Chun Li, or Lara Croft.  Instead, I am just going to keep being an awesome professor with hermoine hair, non-trope curves, and a ginormous brain.  

Beauty Rant Ended Some Other Stuff About Playing Games

Playing: Diablo 3

System: PS4

Developer: Blizzard

Reflection: Last night was my best friends birthdays so after a yoga class I joined her at a local gastro pub for a night out.  After I got home the kids were asleep and lunches were packed so I picked up my controller and played Diablo 3.  The bad news is that when you have had a margarita sometimes you run up to your party members thinking they are enemies in game.  The good news is that I leveled up twice, looted some new gear, and took the lead on teleportation. 

We decided yesterday that my husband should do some guest blogging.  We will ease into that with an interview format and maybe he will build up to actually contributing his own reflections.  Overall, it might be good to have more than a one sided conversation with the internet.

Quitting my Marriage and Picking Up a Controller

Day 1: The 100-Day Countdown Begins

The mere thought of being a wife is too exhausting to contemplate today…So I give up.  My marriage is broken and I have decided I do not want to fix it.  Instead, I am going to reset and try gaming with my partner to see if I still want to remain best friends.  I will blog to chronicle how it is going and let you know if I still like games or the guy I married.   

Am I still a gamer?

After experiencing the Guantanamo level sleep deprivation of being a new parent, I could not fathom why I voluntarily neglected sleeping to play games.  Additionally, having small children has limited the M rated games I play over the last 7 years and I have almost completely abandoned the tawdry way I played them.  I loved to trash talk.  Last year, I completed my dissertation, a solitary process that only left me 10 minutes a day to beat a Yeti in PvZ. 

My husband shifted game modes to table top miniatures and has spent a lot of time and money dedicated to Warmachine/ Hordes.  The November itch would always give way to a short-lived return to the digital but we did not play together.  Partially, because life got in the way, and the other part because my 5-year old is better at FPS play than me now and the hubs doesn’t have the patience for my terrible and awkward play (he needs to get over it now).   

The last few years I have been a mother, teacher, wife but not an avid gamer.  My relationship to games was more proximity than participation.

100 Days

Unlike my previous 100 days these games will be table-top and digital.  We have a new PS4 and shelves filled with board games I haven’t gotten around to trying.  If anyone out there wants to witness my experiment, you are welcome to join in and bring a game along.  I will play co-op, solo side-by-side, with the kids, without the kids, and anything else I can think of.

I have been playing games with the guy I married on-and-off for 18 years.  The next roughly 3 months will determine if I will continue to do so for 18+ more.

Playing: Tales from the Borderlands (TftB) 

System: PS4

Developer: Telltale

Reflection: TftB is amazing because we have been watching a story unfold without the bombardment of commercial breaks.  Its unsettling to make choices that feel right, or I interpret a certain way, and see the way they influence the game is not always what I intended.  After waking up at 4am to finalize my weeks lesson plans, the lack of dexterity required for this game was doable at 10pm.

When bad things happen some people think the only option is divorce. For better or worse I am going to try Diablo before divorce and I will keep you posted on how it goes. 

I'm too busy to be a better teacher: What I learned about college teaching from the Iyengar yoga teacher assessment

"Teaching is a difficult art, but is the best service you can do to humanity."
— B.K.S. Iyengar

In the last 3 weeks I defended my dissertation, taught my 4 courses and took the first level Iyengar certification exam.  Although, I would not recommend this combination to anyone I am writing today to reflect on my experience.  

Throughout the grueling process of preparing for the certified teacher exam I met so many amazing people.  I experienced wonderful hospitality from host studio Yoga Tree in the Seattle area.  But this blog is not a play by play of my trip and test.  Instead, I would like to share how my preparation affected my day job as an adjunct Communications professor. 

 

Unlike K-12 teachers, professors often have no formal teacher training.  The first time I taught as an adjunct I was given a book and a roster and sent on my merry way.  Similarly, the nearest teacher training for Iyengar yoga is more than 100 miles away in Los Angeles or Ventura which seems like a million miles for a mother with a full-time job and 2 kids.

I am so lucky that a locally certified teacher agreed to take me on as an apprentice.  This means that before I started teaching I attended and assisted all the classes she taught before I was permitted to teach.  I first shadowed my mentor more than 4 years ago.  Though continued practice is mandatory and a major part of my life, I have to be honest and admit that at first it seemed the more I taught the less I studied.  

Preparing for certification helped me refine every part of my yoga instruction.  Svādhyāya is the practice of self-study.  It is and one of the Niyamas or self-disciplines we study and apply in the Iyengar tradition.  I didn't change everything about the way I teach but instead I studied other teachers and guidelines to learn how to be better.

My two take away lessons from this process can be summarized in 5 words: 

talk less and keep training.

The hardest part of these words is that my best approach to teaching is to talk less.  For those of you who know me IRL you know that brevity is not my strong suit.  As I grow in my teaching I am learning to be clear by giving concise and simple instruction and to look for the effect in my students.

I have been told a lot lately that "research, professional development, and service" are not part of my "job" as an adjunct professor.  When I think of the 100 outlines waiting to be graded I am almost ready to accept that.  But my Iyengar training reminds me that preparation and self-study are a never ending process of discovery.  My students will fail to learn when I halt my process of discovery or Svādhyāya and become a grading drone.

As a college professor I have the freedom to apply any strategies in my classes that I think will fulfill student-learning outcomes.  What I learned from my study of Iyengar yoga is that I need to humble myself to learn from others instead of always thinking I can figure it out.  Also studying helped empathize with students because taking tests and getting feedback is hard.  But I am happy to report that I passed the first step to certification via the intro 1 Iyengar assessment and have already started studying for my second exam scheduled for next year.

Hope you will come join me for a class in Bakersfield at our local Iyengar studio Yoga Space. 

A few more photos from my trip.  On the top left is the hallways of the Yoga Tree with healthy snacks and a fellow yogi warming up.  In the middle is my study prep on the way home.  The last photo was my view of Seattle from Pike place.  

Why you should not miss that expensive conference: One Adjunct’s Reflection on the 11th International Conference of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL)

In a candid moment at the COCAL XI debriefing, organizers admitted that the high cost of travel to the New York City location limited conference access for many adjuncts living on fixed incomes.  I was fortunate enough to hobble together enough support from my union local and inlaws to subsidize my attendance at a conference.  It took 10 emails requests before I identified funding sources but I am reminded that as adjuncts we miss opportunities when we don’t ask or get discouraged from the first 9 “no’s.” 

In exchange for a one thousand dollar sponsorship my union chapter requested a written summary of the event.  To streamline my synopsis I tweeted throughout the event and my interactions with fellow adjunct activists are ongoing.  Some contingent faculty that could not get to COCAL XI joined through social media and that was great.  Physically being in New York facilitated meaningful face-to-face conversations with international colleagues that were not limited by character entries. 

I am an adjunct professor in Communication Studies in California State University, Bakersfield and I am also a Doctoral candidate in the Educational Leadership program.  At COCAL XI, I met a fellow adjunct from Mexico who is also in the process of completing her dissertation to earn her Doctorate in Education. I should make the distinction that we are not graduate assistants but, instead, adjuncts who are also completing our terminal degrees.  Together we, two adjuncts/doctoral students, made plans to collaborate in collecting future data.  This one interaction is representative of the kind of exchanges that occurred throughout the 3-day COCAL XI conference held at CUNY’s John Jay College on August 4-6^th, 2014. 

An academic labor journal will soon chronicle the topics discussed at COCAL XI, but this blog is meant as a humble prelude.  It is hard to fit three days of articulate discussion into one short write-up, but here are a few ideas that made COCAL XI an event not to be missed.

The Democracy Index

What matters in learning conditions varies between university management and university faculty. A recent CHE survey ranked Cal State University San Marcos as one of 2014’s “great colleges to work for.” However, if you look closer at the survey results you realize that the ranking was based on just one of 12 criteria: Facilities, Workspace, and Security.

At COCAL XI the faculty interest group “Building National Agendas” came up with the idea to create what they called the Democracy Index. The Democracy Index would be a faculty generated rating system that like US and News World Report would rank colleges and universities as learning institutions. However, instead of graduation rates and alumni success, it would focus on other factors such as shared governance, teacher to student ratio, and tuition. A new rating system could shift the conversation away from what the public is told makes a good higher education institution to revealing democratic colleges and universities.

The Wall Street Skim

I have spent eight of my nine years as an educator in higher education fighting to remain in the classroom. Since the economic crisis of 2008, funding for higher education has been under constant attack. As the economy has improved the plight of adjuncts has not. 

The national campaign for “Adjunct Action” has been working to expose the role of big business in exploiting higher education. Adjunct news is not all bleak in America where Senator Durbin has recently introduced a bill that would make adjuncts eligible for a federal loan forgiveness program. 

However, disparity in pay still exists with adjuncts internationally. Some speakers at  COCAL XI shared that they have terminal degrees and experience in the classroom but are not paid the living wages given to their tenured peers. In Mexico an adjunct professor can make as little as $200 a month, whereas some adjuncts in Quebec are making more than 7,000 per class. As Rosa Manoatl, a UNAM PhD student in pedagogy who has taught in higher education in Mexico for more than 30 years, stated, “We need to dignify the job of the professor in my country.”

Adjuncts are the Pillars of the University

The heading of this section is not meant to indicate that without a cheap labor force the university would collapse. Colleges can afford to pay their teachers a living wage. Instead, it is important to recognize that adjuncts make up the NewFaculty Majority. Contingent faculty outnumber tenured faculty and teach the majority of higher education courses. The adjunct ranks are growing not only because they are generally cheap labor, but also because they are doing a good job. Though most off the tenure-line are hired to teach and focus on pedagogy, many voluntarily participate in research, publication, creative works, and service, without financial or employer validation.    

Discussions about theory and activism were alive in every lecture hall at COCAL XI. One common conversation in sessions was the theoretical implications of corporatizing higher education. Similarly, there were stories of adjuncts empowered to unionize, bargain for equity, and mobilize on adjunct issues. During one lunch conversation a fellow adjunct memorably commented that, “I used to feel secure in my job and work closely with management.  When they got rid of my appointment I became more involved with the union and was able to weaponize my institutional knowledge.”  The implication that adjuncts who are reduced are no longer running scared but using what they know to strategically demand our rightful place of permanence in higher education. 

I could not afford to miss this conference.  It gave me the opportunity to tweet with other social media junkies, collaborate with educators from thousands of miles away, and be inspired by the trailblazers that founded the conference.  Though attending conferences stretches contingent faculty financially, it is important to find a way to get there. Meeting with fellow adjuncts is an investment in the future of the profession and of higher education.  

*This post was published on the Academe blog but was re-posted today on my personal blog to be included in storify of COCALXI

@SydniDunn @AAUP here's that #COCALXI group photo pic.twitter.com/LK43EPM9KZ
— PSC_CUNY (@PSC_CUNY) August 6, 2014

.